Do you know how pinhole cameras work? I don’t, really, although I have seen what they can do. You block out the light in a closed-off area, except for one small hole, and direct light through that hole onto the opposite wall of the box. Then you will see a projected image of what’s outside, on the bright side — except the image will be upside-down.
People build pinhole cameras intentionally, but sometimes they happen spontaneously. I recently saw photos from an Australian man whose whole garage became a camera obscura. The door faced the setting sun, and the insulating material that lines the top edge had a tiny gap; so when the man stepped into the dim interior, he could see clearly his driveway projected on the ceiling. The colored recycling bins, the front of his car, and even the pavement were all clearly there, upside down.
It was such a compelling image: The workaday car bumper and plastic bins projecting themselves up above, turning jewel-toned in the darkness. They had something important to say, and the thing was just: “I exist.”
Worth saying, and weirdly beautiful, and obscurely sad.
That was the work of a camera obscura. But did you know that everything is always projecting an image of itself on everything, all the time? We can’t see these images, because they all mix together and make white light. When a camera obscura gets involved, the pinhole blocks out all the images but one, and that’s why we can see it.
Maybe I’ve garbled the science, it makes sense to me as far as I understand it. Sometimes I become aware of this ceaseless projecting happening around me. I briefly know that every created thing – not only living things but everything that is made – proclaims its presence out of the sheer insistent, witless joy of being here. Everything that exists comes from God, and it can’t help sending something of itself out into the world, just because it is good. It’s a very simple message: “God made me, and now here I am!”
Sometimes I feel it, when I encounter the goodness of creation hidden in the hearts of wet grasses, buried under layers of loam, sparkling remotely in stars we rarely see, or in other dear artifacts of creation: In human love, in innocence, in beauty, in truth. Sometimes I see it, and I know deeply that creation is good. Most of the time, I don’t. It’s just too dark.
As I write, where I write from, we are counting down to the darkest day of the year. The calendar is like a box that gets a little smaller every day, with less and less light, less and less warmth, at a sharper and more narrow angle away from the sun.
That has, in fact, been the history of mankind. When God made the world, he made it so bright, so vital, so very fresh and alive. The water didn’t just sit, it teemed with life. God made it, and it was good; and then he gave it to us, and told us to multiply. The created world was so good that it shouted itself, projecting itself everywhere all the time, out of the simple joy of being something rather than nothing. It was a garden: Something that makes more of itself; and God and man walked together through it, beholding it, enjoying it.
Then came the box. Mankind sinned, and fabricated walls, a boundary between us and the Lord, and in the shadows we strained to see any goodness.
We began to be people living in darkness, and the history of mankind became the story of that box getting smaller and smaller.
But the box was not impermeable. It could be pierced . . .
Read the rest of my Christmas column for The Pillar, which includes a recipe for stained glass cookies.
And a blessed Christmas Eve to all of you wonderful readers. I love yez all, but Jesus loves you more.